Currently, various computing system implemented financial management systems are available. Herein, a computing system implemented financial management system can be, but is not limited to, any data management system implemented on a computing system, and/or accessed through a network, that gathers financial data, including financial transactional data, from one or more sources and/or offers the capability to analyze and categorize at least part of the financial data. Herein, a computing system implemented financial management system can be, but is not limited to, any of the following: a computing system implemented personal financial management system; a computing system implemented business financial management system; an on-line banking system; a computing system implemented home and/or business inventory system; a computing system implemented personal and/or business asset management system; a computing system implemented personal and/or business accounting system; a computing system implemented personal and/or business tax preparation system; a computing system implemented healthcare management system; and/or any of the numerous computing system implemented data management systems discussed herein, and/or known to those of skill in the art at the time of filing, and/or as developed after the time of filing, that include the capability to analyze and categorize financial data from multiple sources.
Current computing system implemented financial management systems are typically software and/or Web-based applications which, along with a parent computing system or device, and/or a network, help users manage their finances by providing a centralized interface with banks, credit card companies, asset account providers, mortgage companies, retirement account providers and other various financial and asset management institutions and/or accounts, for identifying, processing, storing, and categorizing user financial transactions. Currently, some computing system implemented financial management systems obtain most, it not all, of the user's financial and/or transactional data as well as a significant amount of the user's demographic and personal data.
Currently, some computing system implemented financial management systems also typically obtain highly detailed financial transaction information from all, or most, sources used, such as payee identification, payee location, payment amount, date of the transaction, time of transaction, products purchased, etc., via communication with banks, credit card providers, or other financial institutions, using data entry, links to databases, and electronic data transfer systems such as the Open Financial Exchange (OFX) specification, or various other systems for transferring financial transaction data.
Using some computing system implemented financial management systems, the financial transaction information, payee identification, payee location, payment amount, date of the transaction, products and/or services purchased via the transaction, various tags and/or labels, and other data is often used by the computing system implemented financial management system to process, categorize and/or tag individual financial transactions as a particular type of income or expense, to generate various financial reports, and to create an overview of the user's financial situation based on input from multiple, and often all, available sources of financial information regarding a given user. Some currently offered computing system implemented financial management systems then use this financial transaction information to track events, such as purchase events, and to provide various historical personal and business data reports or displays including “to date” data reports, such as historical and/or to-date spending data reports, in one or more particular categories and/or tagging schemes, as well as year-end personal and business tax, and/or asset, and/or general financial reports.
While computing system implemented financial management systems have proven to be very powerful and flexible resources, one area where computing system implemented financial management systems have been of limited value is in the area of detecting income sources and, more particularly, identifying incomes sources of a recurring nature.
One reason for this weakness in currently available computing system implemented financial management systems is that while transactional data associated out-going, or debited, financial transactions typically includes very detailed information including payee identification data, payee location data, products purchased, etc., data associated with in-coming, or deposit related, financial transactions typically only includes the deposit amount and date of the transaction, and, therefore, often does not indicate the source of the funds or any other data that could be used to identify a deposit transaction as an specific income, or recurring income, transaction.
As a result, using currently available computing system implemented financial management systems, the user must typically manually identify a given deposit transaction as an income transaction, and/or manually identify the source, or payor, for each income transaction, each time the income transaction appears in the user's financial data, regardless of how often the same income transaction appears. Given that many income transactions are fairly regular and recurring; this puts an undue data entry burden on the user.
To further complicate the situation, many users now have multiple source of income, including, but not limited to: paychecks and/salary; recurring and/or non-recurring bonuses; dividend payments; interest payments; income from on-line auctions; income form various other on-line sources such as advertisers, on-line warehouses, and on-line social networks; structured annuities; structured settlements; alimony; child support; social security; disability payments; other insurance payments; and numerous other sources of income that are currently commonplace. Consequently, relying on a user to accurately identify all of these recurring sources or income is not only a significant burden on the user, but is also prone to mistakes, errors, and/or omissions.
As a result of the situation described above, currently available computing system implemented financial management systems are of typically of limited use for identifying recurring sources of income and/or processing data including recurring sources of income.